My first Kickstarter project: The Digital Street Paper

About a year ago my manager at the Herald & Times set me a challenge – how do you move street papers like the Big Issue into the digital age?

On one level it sounds like a trivial problem. Dozens of solutions already exist to translate newspapers and magazines into digital editions. We already use several such systems for our commercial newspapers and magazines – everything from digital facsimile systems like NewspaperDirect to bespoke print-to-digital workflows like the one we developed between Atex Prestige and our Drupal-based CMS for heraldscotland.com.

Any of those solutions would be a valid way to get street papers into a digital format. But street papers present another, unique challenge… how do you preserve the physical transaction with the vendor on the street when everything is digital?

There are, of course, high-tech solutions to that conundrum – technologies like NFC, RFID and swiping cards with Square readers are all valid solutions. But they’re also fragile, expensive and not particularly well suited to the street vendor environment. In the end I came up with a pretty simple solution. Using cardboard cards printed with unique access codes, vendors could sell ‘digital’ editions of their magazines alongside the regular print editions.